Comment by DiogenesKynikos
2 days ago
So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
2 days ago
So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
Define "worked."
You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.
Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.
Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing.
American English isn’t the only spelling of English.
2 replies →
And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.
We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
This is the argument that Chinese use for keeping their characters. It's ultimate expression is defending electric motor to be written as "lighting clouds power tree table" because if we didn't then it would be anarchy.
English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.